Cyberthreat Information Sharing

The public and private sectors need to increasingly declassify and divulge critical information if the U.S. is to set up effective cyberthreat organizations, according to a report released Wednesday by PwC that sets out a blueprint for how those groups could be set up.

That would certainly lead to faster responses to hack attempts—committed by anyone, whether governments foreign or domestic or criminals—and to more efficient hardening against present and future hack attempts.

Unfortunately, FBI Director James Comey has already written off the concept of public sector—at the Federal government level, anyway—cyberthreat sharing.

That’s a very clear indication of what this administration and its potential Progressive-Democrat successor administration thinks about Government controls.

A Foreign Policy Fallout

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced Tuesday that the biggest military contract in Australia’s history, a $40 billion tender to build 12 submarines, will go to a French naval contractor.  That’s a defeat for Japan’s bid, and with it a lost opportunity to deepen cooperation among the leading Pacific democracies facing China’s rising military.

For all of Turnbull’s rationalizations, this was a major factor in rejecting the Japanese offer:

The most significant influence may have been China, Australia’s largest trading partner, which openly campaigned against Japan’s bid. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned his Australian counterpart in February to remember World War II….

Yeah.  The PRC disapproved, and Australia, with the strength of its American ally demonstrated by our response to the PRC’s occupation of the South China Sea, knuckled under.  Don’t think Japan, in the face of our response to the PRC’s occupation attempts in the East China Sea, isn’t watching this very carefully, and not only for the implications to its shipbuilding industry.

Divide and conquer works.  Especially when the two being divided from each other have been abandoned by a United States become timorous in the face of PRC behaviors.